The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (41 page)

On 25 October 1974, Lenore Knizacky, 23, heard a knock at her door. When she answered it, she was confronted by a young black man who was asking after someone called Charles. Without warning, the man attacked her and started to strangle her. She fought him off and he fled the apartment.

On 30 October, Gloria Steele, 19, also received a knock at her apartment door. Again, it was a black man looking for someone called Charles. As she opened the door, she was also attacked by the man, who this time was armed with a knife. She was stabbed 33 times and died at the scene.

On 12 November, there was a similar incident where the same man tried to attack another woman at her apartment. She managed to fight him off. As the man sped off in a car, the woman was able to catch a glimpse of his number plate. She informed the police, who traced the car to Coral Eugene Watts.

Watts was arrested for assault and battery after the two surviving women identified him in a police line-up. During
questioning, Watts confessed to attacking at least a dozen more women, yet he never admitted to the murder of Gloria Steele. He was ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation at Kalamazoo State Hospital before his court hearing. Psychiatrists found that Watts lacked remorse for his actions and was impulsive, reckless and emotionally detached. However, they did not think he suffered from any kind of psychosis and believed that he was able to distinguish right from wrong. They eventually diagnosed him with antisocial personality disorder. During his stay at the mental hospital, he slipped into temporary depression. He attempted suicide by hanging himself with a cord.

In the summer of 1975, Watts was officially evaluated again. Psychiatrists found that he suffered from depression and posed a danger to himself and others. However, despite his behavioural problems, he was found fit enough to stand trial for the assaults. He was sentenced to one year in jail. Unfortunately, he never stood trial for Steele’s murder because prosecutors lacked strong enough evidence to convict him. He was released in the summer of 1976. After his release, he began dating a woman named Valeria, whom he married in 1979.

Over the course of the next 12 months, many more women were attacked and murdered. One of them was Jeanne Clyne, 44, who was attacked on Hallowe’en in 1979, as she walked home from a doctor’s appointment. She was accosted in broad daylight along a busy suburban road near her home in Grosse Point Farms. She died from 11 stab wounds. The police were unable to find any evidence leading them to a suspect. Initially, detectives suspected Jeanne’s husband, but he was later cleared.

On 20 April 1980 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, high school student Shirley Small, 17, was stabbed to death outside her home. A similar attack took place against Glenda Richmond, also outside her Ann Arbor home, during that summer. The 26-year-old manager of a diner was found dead with 28 stab wounds to her chest. The police found no evidence to point to a viable suspect.

On 14 September, University of Michigan graduate student Rebecca Huff, 20, was found murdered outside her home. She had been stabbed approximately 50 times. Her case was significant because it was one of the first murders that would point to Watts being involved and thus prompted one of Ann Arbor’s largest murder investigations. However, it would be two months before the link between Watts and Rebecca Huff was made.

On 15 November, police had a lucky break. Two policemen were patrolling the area around the main street of Ann Arbor around 5am. They noticed a suspicious man in a car slowly following a woman walking home. The woman realised she was being followed and tried to hide in a doorway, hoping the man would move on. The police officers pulled over Watts’s car and arrested him for driving with expired number plates and a suspended licence. They also searched his car and found several screwdrivers and a box with wood-filing tools. Yet their most significant find was a dictionary with the etched words, ‘Rebecca is a lover’, which belonged to Rebecca Huff. It turned out to be their biggest clue yet linking Watts to the murder, yet it still was not enough evidence to convict him.

The police began 24-hour surveillance of Watts. His movements were monitored with the help of a tracking device that was hidden under his car. Officers hoped to catch him in the act so they could arrest and convict him. They were certain that he was the murderer they desperately sought.

However, Watts knew that he was being watched and he suppressed his urge to kill or assault for two months. With no evidence to go on, the police ended their surveillance and decided to bring him in for questioning. He was interviewed for approximately nine hours, but by the end police were still no further forward. Eventually, he was released from police custody due to lack of evidence.

At the time, police suspected Watts of at least two attempted murders and believed him to have possibly committed five in and around the Detroit area. In the spring of 1981, Watts moved to
Columbus, Texas, where he found work at an oil company. He spent the weekend nights driving more than 70 miles to the Houston area, which became his new hunting ground.

On Sunday, 23 May 1982, Michele Maday, 20, heard a knock at her Houston apartment door. When she opened it, a suspicious-looking man stood before her. Suddenly, the stranger attacked; he beat her and choked her into unconsciousness. While she lay on the floor, the man went to her bathroom, filled her bath with water, and then drowned her before running away.

Later that day, Lori Lister, 21, left her boyfriend’s home and drove back to her Houston apartment. She parked her car and walked towards the front door of her apartment building. She was not aware that she was being followed. As she got out her key and approached the stairs to her apartment, a man with a red hooded sweatshirt suddenly came up behind her and strangled her into semi-unconsciousness. She was certain she was going to die, but managed to let out a small scream. The neighbours overheard the muffled cry and immediately called the police. In the meantime, the man dragged Lori up the stairs to her apartment where he confronted her room-mate Melinda Aguilar, 18. The attacker threatened to slash Melinda’s throat if she screamed. He then choked her until her body went limp. The man had no idea that she was just pretending to be unconscious. He took some hangers and wrapped Melinda’s hands behind her back and placed her on the bed. Then he wrapped Lori’s hands and feet with hangers. While Melinda was in the bedroom, the intruder went to the bathroom and filled the bath with water. Melinda waited for an opportune moment and then jumped off the bedroom’s first-floor balcony. She screamed for help, hoping that it wasn’t too late to save her friend.

Moments later, the police arrived. The intruder, who heard the sirens, tried to escape but police apprehended him in the apartment complex courtyard. The neighbour who had initially alerted the police ran to Lori’s apartment and found her head submerged in the bath. Luckily, she just managed to escape
death. Police identified her attacker as Carl ‘Coral’ Eugene Watts, 29, a Houston mechanic. When they asked him why he tried to kill the women, he told them that they had ‘evil eyes’ and he wanted to ‘release their spirits’.

However, it was difficult building a full case against Watts because of the different methods he had used to kill. He never sexually assaulted his victims and chose strangers to attack. He rarely left evidence behind at the scene because he killed within minutes of encountering his victims.

Following the attacks on Lori Lister and Melinda Aguilar in May 1982, Harris County Assistant District Attorney Ira Jones came up with an idea that would prompt Watts to make a specific and detailed confession to the crimes of which he was suspected. Jones offered Watts a deal. In exchange for information and murder confessions, he would receive immunity to murder charges. Watts agreed and several days later he took police to the burial sites of three of his victims. Watts eventually admitted attacking 19 women, 13 of whom he said he murdered.

Watts told police that he was responsible for the 1979 Detroit murder of Jeanne Clyne, although he did not admit to killing Glenda Richard, Shirley Small or Rebecca Huff, despite Huff’s dictionary being found in his car. He was more forthcoming about his Houston victims. He confessed to drowning University of Texas student Linda Tilley, 22, in her apartment complex swimming pool in September 1981. He also admitted to stabbing to death Elizabeth Montgomery, 25, one week later.

Watts confessed to killing another woman just a few miles away on the same day Elizabeth Montgomery was murdered. Susan Wolf, 21, was returning home from a shopping trip for ice cream when she was stabbed to death several feet from her apartment. Watts admitted to another murder that occurred in January 1982, that of Phyllis Tamm, 27, whom he attacked as she was out jogging. Watts claimed that he choked her with his hands and then hung her from a tree branch with an elastic strap.

Two days later, he murdered architecture student Margaret
Fossi, 25; who apparently died from a blow to the throat. Her body was found in the boot of her car at Rice University. Watts said that he took her shoes, the blueprints she was carrying and her handbag and burnt them. Interestingly, Watts often stole items from his victims and burnt them, hoping to ‘kill the spirit’. He claimed that the reason he committed the murders was because the women had ‘evil eyes’.

Watts also told police that he slashed the throat of a woman trying to change a flat tyre on the side of the freeway. That same month, he claimed to have attacked two other Houston women, one whose throat was also slashed and the other who was stabbed with an ice pick. Amazingly, all three women had managed to survive the fearsome attacks.

Watts also confessed to the murders of Elena Semander, 20; Emily LaQua, 14; Anna Ledet, 34; Yolanda Gracia, 21; Carrie Jefferson, 32; Suzanne Searles, 25 and Michele Maday, 20. He also admitted to attacking three other women. Despite his confession, he was never charged with any of the murders because of the immunity bargain he had struck.

Watts is alleged to have admitted to at least 80 more murders in Michigan and Canada. However, he didn’t give investigators the details of any of those crimes because he was not granted immunity for them. In the end, his strategy to receive the lightest possible penalty for his crimes worked. In court, he pleaded guilty to one count of burglary with intent to kill, just as he bargained for. He eventually received 60 years in a penitentiary, and made a chilling statement. He told the police, ‘If they ever let me out, I’ll kill again.’ They had no doubt that he would keep his promise, for he had long since lost control over his violent impulses and needed to kill to be happy.

Several months into his sentence, Watts attempted an escape. He greased himself with hair gel and tried to squeeze out of his cell window. However, his attempt failed when he got stuck. From that moment on, he adopted a more legal method for getting out of prison – he began appealing against his sentence.
In 1989, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reviewed his case. The Appeal Court judge stated that Watts, when initially arrested, had failed to be informed that the bath water he attempted to drown Lori Lister in was construed as a lethal weapon. Consequently, the court ruled that he was not required to serve his entire sentence. With remission for good behaviour, his sentence would be halved, giving him a final release date of 9 May 2006. With this, he would be considered one of the first self-confessed serial killers to be legally released in US history. During the interim period, he was eligible for parole. However, he would not be granted it. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles refused him parole on six occasions between 1990 and 2004.

In view of Watts’s impending release, police in Michigan and Texas were working hard to find old cases in which evidence might have been overlooked. State police forensic scientists were also hoping to use DNA tests, unavailable in the 1980s, to link Watts to some of the crimes. It was clear to the authorities that should Watts be released he would pose a threat to society and undoubtedly kill again.

At last, 22 years after Watts’s initial sentencing, new evidence came to light that linked him to a historic murder. In 2004, Joseph Foy came forward claiming that he had witnessed Watts murder a woman in December 1979. Foy had recently seen a television programme where an appeal had gone out to viewers to come forward with any new information on Coral Watts or his crimes. He immediately contacted the police and told them what he had witnessed approximately 25 years earlier.

Foy claimed he had seen murder victim Helen Mae Dutcher, 36, struggling in an alleyway with a man who repeatedly stabbed her in the neck and back. Dutcher died moments later from 12 stab wounds. Foy went to the police station to report the crime and a composite picture of the attacker was drawn up. However, after an investigation the police were unable to identify the attacker.

The police, now in possession of Foy’s statement, charged
Watts with Dutcher’s murder and he was extradited back to Michigan to stand trial. If he were found guilty, he would have to serve a mandatory life sentence without parole.

In November 2004, Watts’s trial began and he entered a plea of not guilty. There then followed various legal arguments about the admissibility of his original murder confessions. In the end, the trial judge agreed for them to be used as they showed evidence of similar fact and a definite pattern of behaviour.

The main prosecution witness was Joseph Foy. The defence suggested that he could not have been close enough to make a positive identification. Foy was 25yd away from the suspect and it was dark on the night in question. On 18 November, the jury returned a verdict. Watts was found guilty of the first-degree murder of Helen Dutcher. Watts reacted to the verdict by rolling his eyes and shaking his head, whereas the victims’ families rejoiced after hearing the verdict and ‘embraced each other and Joseph Foy’. On 7 December, Watts was sentenced to life imprisonment with no parole.

Following on from this trial, authorities in Michigan started making moves to try him for the murder of Western Michigan University student Gloria Steele, who was stabbed to death in 1974. On 25 July 2007, Watts’s trial for the Steele murder began in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He was found guilty and sentenced to a further term of life imprisonment.